"Selected Words" is a public art project which was the result
of a collaboration with a group of five students from Sir Francis Drake
High School, Bay Area, California.

In this piece, all aspects of form, content, and context grew out of
a dialogue between the students and myself.The project consisted of reproducing
seven quotations relating to the themes of knowledge, thinking and learning
on the windows of the San Rafael Public Library.

We approached each quotation as an individual design element, manipulating
the form and shape of the letters in order to emphasize certain aspects
of the quotation's content in a poetic way, while making the viewer more
aware of the very act and process of reading. In this way, we sought to
create a work which is multivalent; which exposes several layers of meaning
and reference at a time. Seyed Alavi